Methodology

The data

Every figure on the site comes from BACI, the international trade database of CEPII, the French research centre for international economics. This is version 202601, in the HS92 revision of the product classification.

BACI records goods trade by year, exporter, importer and product, from 1995 to 2024. Each record has a value in current US dollars and a quantity in metric tons. The site shows values; the quantities are in the database behind it and not yet on a page.

One figure for each flow

Nations report their trade to the United Nations, and every flow can be reported twice: once by the exporter and once by the importer. The two rarely agree. Importers count the cost of freight and insurance and exporters do not, and either side can misrecord a product or a destination.

BACI settles on one figure. CEPII estimates the freight and insurance in the importer’s figure and removes it, then weighs the two reports by how reliable each reporter has proved against its partners. A nation that filed no report of its own in a year still has figures, drawn from what its partners reported.

Years

Values are in the dollars of their year and are not adjusted for prices, so some of the rise in any line across the years is inflation and movement in the dollar.

The latest year is the least settled. CEPII gathers the reports each January, when some nations have yet to file for the year just ended, and says that flows for that year can be missing or rest on one side’s report. Later versions revise them. World goods trade as the data has it:

Categories and products

Products are classified by the Harmonized System, the customs nomenclature most of the world’s trade is recorded in. Its codes are six digits; the first two are the chapter. The site’s 96 categories are the chapters, under shortened names, and each category’s page lists its largest six-digit products.

The Harmonized System is revised every few years. The site uses the 1992 revision because it is the only one that reaches back to 1995: trade reported under later revisions is converted back to the 1992 codes, so a category means the same thing in every year. A product that did not exist in 1992 is counted under the 1992 code it corresponds to.

Names and regions

BACI uses the United Nations’ list of trading entities, which includes territories and customs areas as well as states. The site gives each a common name (United States, South Korea) in place of the list’s formal or abbreviated one, and a region: the continent it sits in. The entry the United Nations calls “Other Asia, not elsewhere specified” is in practice Taiwan and is named so here.

8 names are no longer in use: states that have split or merged, and former customs unions. Each keeps a page for the last year it was recorded, and all are listed at the foot of the Nations page.

Left out

• Services, and anything else that is not goods.
• Trade within a nation.
• Flows that neither side reported.

Reading the explorer

Each nation’s arc is as long as its exports. A ribbon joins two nations and is as wide at each end as that end’s exports to the other, so a ribbon that narrows from one side to the other is a lopsided relationship. The ribbon takes the colour of whichever nation sends more.

The largest traders of the chosen year are drawn by name, up to forty, and the rest are folded into Other. With a category chosen, the largest are the largest in that category. Colour is the nation’s region or, under Balance, how far its exports and imports are apart: the full colour is reached where one is three times the other.

Licence and citation

BACI is distributed by CEPII under the Etalab Open Licence 2.0, which allows any use provided the source is named. The reference for it is: Gaulier, G. and Zignago, S. (2010), BACI: International Trade Database at the Product-Level. The 1994-2007 Version. CEPII Working Paper 2010-23.